In recent years, LinkedIn has expanded to become a worldwide pillar for professionals, job seekers, employers, networkers, content producers and learners of all kinds. In fact, it was just recently announced that LinkedIn proudly boasts more than 500 million members from 200 different countries, making it one of the most widely used and recognizable powerhouse platforms available.
Given the widespread popularity of the platform and vast products and services available through it, it’s not hard to understand why advertisers gravitate towards LinkedIn. Recent studies have shown tremendous benefits that come from advertising on LinkedIn:
- 80 percent of B2B leads come from LinkedIn
- 94 percent of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content
- 46 percent of social media traffic coming to B2B company sites is from LinkedIn
- 43 percent of marketers say they’ve sourced a customer from LinkedIn
- LinkedIn SlideShare reaches 70 million unique visitors a month, making it among the top 100 most-visited website in the world
While those numbers are impressive, they’re certainly not hard to believe. LinkedIn, by its very nature, tends to attract a more pragmatic audience than other platforms. Whereas other social platforms are often used for leisure and recreation, LinkedIn is often used for more serious and deliberate pursuits, making it an ideal place to cash in on purchase intent and lead potential. Now, with a new development in LinkedIn advertising, that will become even truer.
LinkedIn Introduces Matched Audiences
LinkedIn has launched Matched Audiences, which is a set of targeting capabilities that will give advertisers the unique ability to combine LinkedIn’s powerful professional data with their own first-party data. Per a blog post from LinkedIn’s Senior Product Manager,
“With Matched Audiences you can use LinkedIn to retarget your website visitors, market to your contacts from your customer databases and marketing automation platforms, and reach decision makers at target companies for your account-based marketing programs. Matched Audiences helps increase ROI by enabling you to focus your efforts on the audiences and accounts that are most likely to drive revenue.”
Inside LinkedIn Matched Audiences
Matched Audiences will give advertisers three new targeting tools called website retargeting, account targeting, and contact targeting respectively.
Website Retargeting: This will allow advertisers to re-engage website visitors who have already visited your site on LinkedIn. Using it, you can create target audiences from your website visitors to produce always-on campaigns.
Account Targeting: With account targeting, advertisers can upload a list of target company names and match that against almost 12 million company pages on LinkedIn. This allows advertisers to market to influencers and decision makers at your target accounts (this really caters to the B2B marketing use of LinkedIn we touched on earlier in this article).
Contact Retargeting: Much like it sounds, contact targeting lets advertisers securely upload a list of email addresses or import lists of contact to engage prospects and contacts on LinkedIn.
The pilot program for these matched audience targeting options showed impressive results with high ROI and lowered costs:
- 30 percent increase in CTR and a 14 percent drop in post-click cost-per-conversion with Website Retargeting,
- 32 percent increase in post-click conversion rates and 4.7 percent drop in post-click cost-per-conversion with Account Targeting, and
- 37 percent increase in click rate (CTR) with Contact Targeting
Overall, LinkedIn’s matched audiences present exciting new options that have big earning potential for advertisers.
Republished by permission. Original here.
LinkedIn Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “What is LinkedIn Matched Audiences And How Can You Use It to Target Your Customers?” was first published on Small Business Trends